1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to managing the use of digital documents by users.
2. Related Art
Heretofore, digital documents (referred to hereinafter as simply documents), such as text documents, audio documents, and multimedia documents, were registered in a server and documents were provided in response to user requests.
In the management of digital document usage, the management of document usage rights (use of rights relating to the document) given to a user is important. Heretofore, the management of usage rights relating to documents is usually performed using an access control list (ACL). As is widely known, in the ACL are registered for every document (file) to be managed the rights of each user or group for the document, such as read enabled/disabled, write enabled/disabled, and so forth. If a request for an operation with respect to a document is received from a user, the management system judges, based on the ACL, whether or not the operation falls within the rights of that user and then judges whether or not to allow or prohibit the operation.
In a known system of another related art, the server encrypts documents to be provided to the user and the user acquires information for decryption from the server every time a document within the user's terminal is used. In this system, since access to the server from the user's terminal is performed at every use, the server can record the operations that were performed with respect to the document that was provided to the user.
Furthermore, in a known system or apparatus of another related art, a digital document is printed by a printer, the identification information or coordinate information listed on the printed result is associated with the digital document and stored in a document management database. Writing is performed on the printed document using a coordinate input device or electronic information input interface, such as an electronic pen, and the obtained update information of the digital document based on identification information or coordinate information is associated with the digital document and stored and updated in an operation history management database or operation history management document folder.
In one conventional system of this type, manual-based editing on a paper document is directly reflected in a digital document and a series of updated versions of digital documents is stored as a tree configuration with the digital documents as nodes.